A morning outing

Tuesday saw my return to Middle Lane after an absence of some weeks, with the primary objective being to pay a visit to the East Street hollyhock, the hollyhocks nearer home having mostly been knocked out by the heat and drought of August. There is also the wonder about its perenniality: the book says that hollyhocks are generally grown as annuals or biennials, succumbing to rust if you try and keep them going. While the East Street one seems to have been going for years. 

Inspection of the archive reveals that 'going on for years' actually means since last year. Before that, I was more interested in the hollyhocks at the top of Meadway, with occasional sightings elsewhere. See references 1, 2 and 3. Tracking down this last requiring me to work out that searching the blog for 'hollyhock' did not include 'hollyhocks'.

I go to Gemini, who offers an unsolicited, but thankfully short, essay on energy tariffs before getting started on hollyhocks. I wonder if this is the thin end of the wedge, and that Gemini's offering will be progressively infested with advertisements, rather in the way of the originally clean gmail. With advertisers getting to taint the content too? Blurring the boundaries? A worrying development - or is it just finger trouble again?

But he goes on to confirm my idea the hollyhocks were fairly short lived and that they do have substantial taproots, which help them through dry spells. And to get by when growing in a crack in the pavement!

In response to a supplementary, he explains that the killer rust lives in the above ground part of the plant, mainly but not exclusively in the leaves, overwintering at the base of the plant. It weakens rather than kills the plant, but this does shorten its anyway fairly short life and does leave it open to other problems, which might well be fatal, particularly over the winter.

Botany aside, this particular hollyhock, having hit the overhang above, had developed a bushy habit, with lots of flowers, as can be seen in the opening snap.

A close-up. The telephone managed quite well on this occasion.

It even managed a decent zoom.

I wondered about the white blobs around the base of the column, moved onto Google Images, and after some clarifying supplementaries, I zoomed in even further.

With the following result from Google Images. And he could hold his own when I moved onto Proust's interest in such matters. But I shall not check chapter and verse, at least, not until after breakfast.

I close with the Screwfix whitebeam.

PS 1: a digression. It sounds a long way, but at 2 miles an hour, I suppose you could row it in a week. Assuming that you do not lose too much time at the locks. Maybe a kayak which you could carry? I have yet to turn up a map for the purpose, but references 5 and 6 are a start.

PS 2: second thoughts on 'worrying' on my morning circuit. On reflection, a bit weak.

I associated to the practise the publishers of women's magazines used to have of inserting advertisements - for baby food, patent saucepans or whatever - disguised as content in their magazines. I think the rule now is that such advertisements have to come clean, with confessions top and bottom of each page.

It is also the case that search engine providers sell access to their search algorithms, that is to say you can pay to have your content pushed to the top or near the top of the search rankings. The middle men hawking hotel rooms come to mind. Which is irritating, but at least it is reasonably visible.

But if the large language model providers sell access to their training algorithms, perhaps by giving special weight during training to nominated pages, what then? It would be much harder to identify any particular offering from the model as being connected with this or that sponsor.

Thinking on my feet, one solution that popped into mind was that all such providers had to provide a prominent list of such sponsors, with the big sponsors at the top of the list. And to avoid the Cayman Islands flavoured dodges prominent in the tax world, the only sponsors that would be allowed would have to be publicly listed companies, for which there was a degree of public accountability. And small companies would have to find big companies that were listed to sponsor them. With such arrangements also being subject to public report.

We end users could then, for example, elect to use a subscription service which did not do this sort of thing.

Next up, the problem of bad actors flooding the Internet with bad material, all ready to be soaked up during large language model training. Rather in the way that bad actors are said to be flooding social media with material that is both unpleasant and dangerous - but also clickable. Perhaps decorated with porn.

Rubbish in, rubbish out as we used to say.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/05/trolley-859.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/04/trolleys-818-and-819.html. Curiously, Google Images thought that it was some kind of cucumber or marrow at this point.

Reference 3: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/search?q=hollyhocks. The first appearance of hollyhocks in these pages. The first of many.

Reference 4: https://naturesdepths.com/the-intimate-life-of-a-hollyhock-flower/. A fine reference provided by Google Images.

Reference 5: https://www.visitthames.co.uk/trail/river-thames-map/67d2b4aff3d22ac898d90ace/. 

Reference 6: https://www.ukwaterwaysguide.co.uk/map/river-thames/main-channel.

Group search key: 20260922, aisk.